Simone Joyner, Getty Images Since his stint in Modest Mouse a few years ago, former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr has kept a second home in Portland, Ore. The Manchester, England native had been hoping to spend some extended time in the US. "Portland found me, really," he tells Spinner over the phone from England. "I've been away a while ...

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images It's largely forgotten today: Smack in the middle of Beatlemania, there were three kids from California who actually had a bigger fan club than the Fab Four in the UK. The Walker Brothers, as they were known, sang dramatic ballads with cavernous orchestral accompaniment, and for a brief period in the ...

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images | Paul Natkin/WireImage Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel must have had tongues firmly planted in cheeks when they named their 2003 reunion the Old Friends tour. After all, the former duo had spent years feeding off their contempt for each other, as did their invited opening act Don and Phil Everly, the ...

Bob Berg, Getty Images Morpheus, as Mark Sandman liked to explain, is the god of dreams. The late songwriter's unique band, Morphine, got its start in an exotic Cambridge, Mass., nightclub called the Middle East, which featured belly-dancing. Its songs -- 'Cure for Pain,' 'A Head with Wings,' 'Like Swimming' -- were about entering ...

Michael Weintrob Bootsy's back, baby! Bootsy Collins, the most rubbery bassist alive, releases his "musical biography," 'Tha Funk Capital of the World,' on April 26. The star-packed album arrives a little less than a year after the death of Bootsy's brother, Phelps "Catfish" Collins, with whom he helped invent funk music in James Brown's ...

Peter Still, Redferns By the time of the Clash's last album, released in 1985, the great political punk band had been in shambles for three years. The title of the album, chosen at the last minute by manager Bernie Rhodes, was probably the best thing about the group's messy farewell. It was called 'Cut the Crap.' Three years earlier, the ...

RB/Redferns He dressed like he was in mourning. His life was marked by tragedy, and his biggest hits were exquisitely broken-hearted. Yet Roy Orbison, who would have been 75 on April 22, led a rich, happy, contented life before his premature death in 1988. "He'd say, 'They need one man to be sad and lonely, and they gave me the crown,'" ...